Biden’s calm and steady acceptance caps a unifying Democratic convention

In accepting the Democratic presidential nomination, Joe Biden decisively debunked the accusation by President Trump that he is “sleepy” or mentally impaired. His speech may not have been soaring oratory, but it was a self-assured and sobering address. It combined a withering indictment of the man he referred to disdainfully as “the current occupant of the White House” with a promise to “choose hope over fear, facts over fiction, fairness over privilege.”

Biden’s overarching emphasis was on the urgency of replacing a president who has “cloaked America in darkness for much too long” and failed to deal competently with a pandemic that has upended the economy. Character, compassion and decency, he said, were on the ballot; much of the convention had been spent demonstrating those qualities in Biden. Invoking Franklin Delano Roosevelt, he also promised to harness the power of government to improve the lives of Americans, including young people who know only an America of rising inequality.

The former vice president thus evoked the two themes of the party’s virtual convention. One was the moral and political imperative of ending the misrule of the ever more unhinged and erratic incumbent. The other was a commitment to tackle racial and economic inequities that have been thrown into shocking relief by the coronavirus pandemic.